Ray Furse

As a Chicagoan this is a fun book to own but it isn't great. The old photos are amazing but they aren't presented well - the most glaring problem is that they do not have a date on them! Why not include what year they were taken? Without that a lot of the context is lost.

I also think it would have been great to line up the old and new shot exactly to see the exact same thing however many years apart, instead of "here is the old photo; here is the stock photo we found of the same thing around the time the book was published." At least I'm assuming they were stock photos because if they sent someone to get those photos for this assignment they should have done a better job. Or have gotten a bigger budget so they could do a better job.

There were also some editing errors in the text and one mislabeled picture, which showed the Frank Gehry ampitheater in Millennium Park but was captioned a sculpture by Anish Kapoor (that sculpture is, of course, Cloud Gate aka the Bean and is preeeeetty distinct. Whoops!).

So: it's an interesting book, with interesting historical tidbits, but no great attention to detail and not mind-blowing. Worth owning for the Chicago buff but not spectacular.… (meer)